Alternative ATI drivers?

[Chrushev]

If your existing drivers already work, what do you want them to do for your 4 year old card? She's tapped out and isn't even being sold anymore. Either upgrade to a current generation card or just accept what you already have.

The goal here is NOT to get more power out of it... the goal hereis to ensure that I am getting the most power out of it.

Those 2 are completely different things

 

[GotNoRice]

SO nvidia still does performance tweaking in drivers for say the 8800 series of gpu's?

I can't speak to that end, as it's not like I'm running benchmarks with old hardware every time new drivers come out. But if Nvidia is willing to put enough effort into these older cards to the point where they still get to take advantage of brand new features such as adaptive VSync, I'd say it's a good bet they are including other tweaks as well. Patch notes often cite improvements that don't appear to be tied to particular hardware models.

And notice I said performance tweaking for games not just drivers that support them.

So are they actively fixing bugs and provide performance improvements ?

You're talking about little tweaks... Windows 8 was just released and there are still no Windows 8 drivers for 4000 series and earlier. Even if nvidia isn't bringing every last tweak to their older cards, at least they've got baseline support taken care of

Don't you find it pathetic on at least some level that my 6800 Ultra AGP has better Windows 8 support than my 4870x2?

 

[Chrushev]

Games like mw3, me2 or l4d2 don't count as modern games. At least not in terms of graphics. Might as well have said sims or FIFA.

My definition of modern games include, the most recent version from these series:
Nfs
Dirt showdown
Bf
Crysis
Metro
Stalker
Rockstar games like gta or max Payne or sleeping dogs and stuff
A less than 2 years old unreal engine based game
Skyrim is semi modern,
Etc

IMO anything less than 5830/5850 or GTX 460 isn't worth keeping for serious gamers on a budget. And I would personally not recommend anything lower than 6950 or GTX 570 if you have a chance for these.

And if 4800 users are so happy then I see nothing wrong with older drivers. Companies can't support ancient cards forever.

You do realize that the 4850 will chew up and spit out basically every game you have listed right? Skyrim is less than a year old as of this post... it runs on a brand new engine, and of the games you listed is THE most modern game. Everythign else uses Unreal3 or Frostbite engine, U3 pre-dates the 4850 by a few years... Crysis 2's engine runs more efficiently than Crysis 1, and 4850 will run Crysis 1 all day long...

a 4 year old video card could see problems from textures being insanely huge or DX11 only games with DX11 features. Perhaps overboard particle effects... sure you may have to turn filtering and particle effects down, and set textures to High instead of Ultra.. but for the most part top end cards in the 4000 series are not obsolete yet... perhaps in a year (with the new consoles pushing for DX11 only games) they will be obsolete...

 

[Chrushev]

You're talking about little tweaks... Windows 8 was just released and there are still no Windows 8 drivers for 4000 series and earlier. Even if nvidia isn't bringing every last tweak to their older cards, at least they've got baseline support taken care of

Don't you find it pathetic on at least some level that my 6800 Ultra AGP has better Windows 8 support than my 4870x2?

They actually did release a Windows 8 driver package to support legacy cards... however they pretty plainly stated that there will be no more updates and this package comes as is.... so they basically took the 12.6 driver and re-packaged it so that Windows 8 dosent freak out when installing it...
Link to the driver - http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/catalystlegacywin8.aspx

 

[GotNoRice]

They actually did release a Windows 8 driver package to support legacy cards... however they pretty plainly stated that there will be no more updates and this package comes as is.... so they basically took the 12.6 driver and re-packaged it so that Windows 8 dosent freak out when installing it...
Link to the driver - http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/catalystlegacywin8.aspx

This AMD Catalyst™ driver version features Windows® 8 support for the AMD Radeon™ HD 4000, HD 3000 and HD 2000 series. Please note that the driver is not Microsoft® logo certified and only supports WDDM 1.1 driver level features.

WDDM 1.1 = Windows 7 drivers. They didn't actually change anything. WDDM is designed to be forward and backward compatible, so they will work just the same as if you installed Vista drivers (WDDM 1.0) on Windows 7. That is in-fact what you still have to do if you have an AMD DX9 card, as those cards never saw official Windows 7 drivers after they were abandoned to the legacy driver.

for the most part top end cards in the 4000 series are not obsolete yet... perhaps in a year (with the new consoles pushing for DX11 only games) they will be obsolete...

Why would a push to DX11 make 4000 series cards obsolete? DX10.1 hardware is able to run DX11 games directly due to compatibility features built directly into DX11.

With current DX9 console ports even a 4850 is stuck just using Shader model 3.0. With a DX11 game, while it's true that it won't be using Shader Model 5.0 like a true DirectX11 card, it would still be using Shader Model 4.1 via the DirectX10.1 downlevel path. The game itself would still run fine, even if it is "DX11 only".

 

[Makaveli]

Don't you find it pathetic on at least some level that my 6800 Ultra AGP has better Windows 8 support than my 4870x2?

The only thing pathetic is windows 8

But ya there is something wrong with that lol.

 

[Chrushev]

The only thing pathetic is windows 8

But ya there is something wrong with that lol.

I dunno, so far all of my benchmark (same hardware) come a hair ahead of Windows 7... boot times are halved as well...

The whole Start screen thing is pretty nice once you set it up the way you want it....

Id say overall Win 8 is no Vista.. and actually is better than Win 7...

 

[iCyborg]

boot times are halved as well...

Not surprising since it's more like hibernate than a proper boot.

 

[Makaveli]

I dunno, so far all of my benchmark (same hardware) come a hair ahead of Windows 7... boot times are halved as well...

The whole Start screen thing is pretty nice once you set it up the way you want it....

Id say overall Win 8 is no Vista.. and actually is better than Win 7...

Boot times are a none issue for me since I reboot the computer maybe once a month.

Its either on or asleep.

The start screen is a issue for me because the whole thing feels like two GUI slapped together on one OS.

Win 8 is only usable for me if I have start 8 installed in its default state its just a pain in the ass to use.

 

[Dark Shroud]

Don't you find it pathetic on at least some level that my 6800 Ultra AGP has better Windows 8 support than my 4870x2?

I don't because I remember Nvidia's complete lack of support for Vista. I especially remember the guys with Nforce chip sets having all kinds of problems even compatibility issues with other Nvidia motherboard drivers they had installed.

Meanwhile my x300 SE ran without issue a few months later I upgraded to the x1950 Pro.

AMD has legacy driver packages use those or upgrade.